No, but you could achieve similar effect by giving me a few billion $.

Even more accurately: society is benefited by constantly exploring (and exercising) multiple different survival strategies (capitalism, collectivism, religion…) at the same time. These various strategies are inevitably in tension, producing tons of overall unhappiness.

Like an octopus spreading its tentacles, trying to explore every crevice of its environment, but sometimes accidentally bumping two or more tentacles together. Sure, the tentacles won’t destroy each other but that’s not the point: In this metaphor, we are merely the cells on the surface. Our suffering is just part of the whole organism trying to balance exploration with self-preservation.

or a trainplane

Don’t wanna state the obvious, but it looks like they still ended up staring at each other for the rest of the evening.

They have shown that they still love each other, so hope they can work with their one irreconcilable difference.

RTFB

Along with other things said here, people tend to “forget” that there’s a real person on the other end.

I vaguely recall Nicholas Christakis talking about a study they made, where they created a bot which would simply remind people of the fact that there’s a real person on the other end, and they found that it would help. (That study was done in some university platform and is centuries old in internet time, though. I think he spoke about it about 6 years ago on podcast with Sam Harris.)

/s means sarcasm.

(I myself don’t find this one funny though…)

I don’t have experience with Twitter or Mastodon but it reminds me of time when I quit drinking.

When I quit drinking and tried to stay around people I used to drink with, I realized really fast how pointless this “engagement” (really just two people speaking past each other, and feeling like they have deep conversation) is. It’s almost insulting what a waste of effort such an “engagement” can be.

Some people see “free stuff”, and assume that it’s now open season on wasting OP’s time.

It’s a good way to kill any enthusiasm. Imagine your kid made a spaghetti portrait as a gift for you and instead of just accepting it you asked, “but what exactly did you do differently from all kids on the block?”

Why? Why ask for this from the creator?

If someone can create new software and offer it for free, they should not also be expected to also create a comprehensive analysis of what other people did and list of differences.

Just take it or leave it, it’s that simple. No need to act as if you’re trying to waste some door-to-door salesman’s time.

Edit: I expected some downvotes but not that many.

To my defense, the question in this thread is “you could elaborate what exactly you did different than all the others”. Look, I’m not a native English speaker either but I feel we could agree that is still pretty far away from simply being curious about design choices or “what led you to create this” sort of exploratory question.

I might have overreacted, though, so sorry for that.

When it comes to identifying the server, hostname the first thing that counts. lemmy.world or mastodon.social or google.com are three different hostnames. At this point you can basically treat the period as no special character, it’s just part of the funny world. This basically answers your question: those are two different domains, ie. for all purposes, different instances.

However, your computer does not really connect to hostname but to IP address, so the next important thing is to translate the hostname to an IP address.

Aside: a valid hostname does not even have to have period in it. For example, localhost is a valid hostname! But generally hostnames without periods don’t get translated to any useful IP addresses. localhost is probably the only one widely used hostname but your OS will translate it to a special IP address which marks your own device.)

So to translate the hostname to IP address is done using so-called DNS. So before you can connect, your computer already knows an IP address of a DNS server, and asks it to translate the hostname to IP address. Technically, this is still not where the period is strictly important.

Where the period does start to be meaningful is when you think about: so we have billions of IP addresses, billions of hostnames, how do we organize it all? Who is going to maintain the huge massive list?

So it works like this: There are dozens of organizations, each of which is assigned one or more “top level domains” (TLD). Then they are responsible for maintaining lists of all hostnames ending with those domains. Many of these organizations are local to certain states. For example, in Czech Republic, where I live, we have organization called CZ.NIC which maintains all domains ending with .cz. So it’s up to CZ.NIC how it manages permissions and gives out the domains. In this case, basically anyone can register any free domain ending with .cz, and what this registration means is that now they can get a server with an IP address, run whatever they want and have the registered domain name point to that IP address.

Note that other organizations may decide to add additional rules. For example .uk domains are managed with extra rules, where non-government (commercial) entities are normally allowed to register only .co.uk and other .uk names are not handed out easily. I don’t actually know the details about .uk but my point is that if you are going to think about a hostname and how to begin to understand who owns it, first thing that matters is the TLD, and from that point the rules might be slightly different. To be fair, I haven’t seen much variance between this; almost all public TLD’s I’ve seen were either “simple”, meaning myname.tld or this thing that UK does (also New Zealand, from the top of my head).

One almost universal rule is, though, that if I, say, register seznam.cz with CZ.NIC, then I automatically get not only seznam.cz but also any address I can possibly come up which ends with .seznam.cz. foo.seznam.cz, bar.seznam.cz, www.seznam.cz, I can now start organizing my servers using this whole infinite space, with any number of extra periods. I could totally start a business and start promoting my server foo.bar.baz.whatever.cz on billboards, as long as CZ.NIC grants me whatever.cz.

So back to your question: mastodon.social and piefed.social are two completely different domains. All we know that they have in common is that whoever registered them, had to deal with the same organization; that is whoever maintains .social.

So TL;DR: there’s really nothing that suggests that they would be the same instance.

What’s even worse that the stolen comment got much more engagement than the original.

I’ve seen her comments all around YouTube, and this always seems to happen to her. (I’m assuming it’s because they are the most insightful, informative yet still on point.) Don’t give up Barbara, some of us are seeing through the scam and rooting for you!

but no pepersplaining please

Is it AI though? I thought AI’s are blocked from using celebrity faces.

I assumed someone made it with AI using unspecified faces and then photoshopped in the real ones.

ALL KINDS OF SUFFERING ARE MERGE CONFLICTS

GIT IS OUR MIRROR

REBASE IS HEAVEN

Also in my experience LLM can often propose solutions which are working but way too complex.

Story time: just yesterday, in VueJS I was trying to iterate over a list of items and render .text of reach item as HTML, but I needed to process it first. Note that in VueJS this is done by adding eg. <span v-html="item.text"></span> where content of the attribute is the JavaScript expression needed to get the text.

First I asked ChatGPT to write the function for processing the text. That worked pretty well and even used part of the JavaScript API which I was not aware about.

Next, I had a “dumb moment” when I did not realize that as I’m iterating through items I can just say <span v-html="processHtml(item.text)"></span>, that’s all I really needed. Somehow I thought (or should I say, “hallucinated”, ba dum tsss) for a moment that v-html is special or something (it is used differently than the most abundant type of syntax). So I went ahead and asked ChatGPT how to render processed texts while iterating.

It came with a rather contrived solution which involved creating another computed property containing a list of processed texts. I started to integrate it into the existing loop: I would have to add index and use that index to pull the code from the computed property, which already felt a little bit weird.

That’s when it struck me: no, no, no, I can just f*ing use the function.

TL; DR: The point is, while ChatGPT was helpful I still needed to babysit it. And if I didn’t snap from my lazy moment, or if I simply didn’t know better, I would end up with code which is more complex, more surprising, which means harder to reason about for both humans and LLM’s. (For humans because now it forces you to speculate about coder’s intent, and for LLM’s because it’s less likely to be reminiscent of surrounding code in its learning data.)

Do you “discard” the water by… just letting it into the sink? How long before aresnic is everywhere?

Honestly I prefer saying “Good Day” in Czech as well (that’s the most abundant one used here).

At some point I realized that the whole thing has silent “I wish you”, which also means that if I say “Dobrý den” (==“Good day”) I’m actually being more generous. So correcting me to “Dobrý večer” (== “Good evening”) because it’s 7 PM or whatever is actually not just petty but also kind of a dick move.

(Edit: I also realize that my explanation is probably the pinnacle of pettiness, with just a little pinch of dickmoveines on top…)

Definitely not 4.

Forget about Alex. That seat cushion would not stay clean for long.

Is it Satan, though? Looks like a just a common devil. He would probably just try to talk you into some dumb contract and fail in an amusing way. No racism, no shit talking, no being asshole, kind of a polite guy.

OK, maybe slight smell of burned sulfur but that would be it.